This first collaboration of two long-time feminist and antiwar activists is a wonderful melding of word and image that creates a powerful call for world peace. Paley's poems and short fiction and William's vivid watercolors depict the beauty and dignity of "ordinary" lives from El Salvador to the Bronx, from New Hampshire to Vietnam. Scenes and stories of domestic life, solitude, and nature are interspersed with heart-wrenching images of women widowed and children crippled by war and incarcerated by urban poverty, Here, too, are stories and paintings of protest, joyous and defiant.

"The book combines a series of sixty-minute, sixty-sentence walks around Manhattan and a pair of dialogues about walking -- one of which takes place during a late-night 'philosophical' ramble through Central Park."--Publisher's website.

The collected poems--some never previously published--of one of our best-loved, most respected authors. Combining Grace Paley's four previous collections and new unpublished work, Begin Again traces the career of this direct, attentive, never predictable poet. Whether she describes the vicissitudes and pleasures of life in New York City or the hard beauty of her adoptive rural Vermont, whether she celebrates the blessings of friendship or protests against social injustice, her poems brim with the compassion and tough good humor that have made her stories and essays famous.

This rich and multifaceted collection is Grace Paley's vivid record of her life. As close to an autobiography as anything we are likely to have from this quintessentially American writer, Just As I Thought gives us a chance to see Paley not only as a writer and "troublemaker" but also as a daughter, sister, mother, and grandmother. Through her descriptions of her childhood in the Bronx and her experiences as an antiwar activist to her lectures on writing and her recollections of other writers, these pieces are always alive with Paley's inimitable voice, humor, and wisdom.

A genealogy of the figure of the woman artist - performer, painter or writer - in selected literary texts from the beginning of the 19th century to our own times.

American women writers have long been creating an extraordinarily diverse and vital body of fiction, particularly in the decades since World War II. Recent authors have benefited from the struggles of their predecessors, who broke through barriers that denied women opportunities for self-expression. This reference highlights American women writers who continue to build upon the formerly male-dominated canon. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for more than 60 American women writers of diverse ethnicity who wrote or published their most significant fiction after World War II. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes:^L^DBLA brief biography^L^DBLA discussion of major works and themes^^DBLA survey of the writer's critical reception^L^DBLA bibliography of primary and secondary sources

This unprecedented collection brings together the major Jewish American writers of the past fifty years as they examine issues of identity and how they’ve made their work respond. E.L. Doctorow questions the very notion of the Jewish American writer, insisting that all great writing is secular and universal. Allegra Goodman embraces the categorization, arguing that it immediately binds her to her readers. Dara Horn, among the youngest of these writers, describes the tendency of Jewish writers to focus on anti-Semitism and advocates a more creative and positive way of telling the Jewish story. Thane Rosenbaum explains that as a child of Holocaust survivors, he was driven to write in an attempt to reimagine the tragic endings in Jewish history. Here are the stories of how these writers became who they are: Saul Bellow on his adolescence in Chicago, Grace Paley on her early love of Romantic poetry, Chaim Potok on being transformed by the work of Evelyn Waugh. Here, too, are Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Erica Jong, Jonathon Rosen, Tova Mirvis, Pearl Abraham, Alan Lelchuk, Rebecca Goldstein, Nessa Rapoport, and many more. Spanning three generations of Jewish writing in America, these essays — by turns nostalgic, comic, moving, and deeply provocative- constitute an invaluable investigation into the thinking and the work of some of America’s most important writers.

Richard Dadd is a trickster, a pre-post-modern enigma wrapped in a Shakespearean Midsummer Night’s Dream; an Elizabethan Puck living in a smothering Victorian insane asylum, foreshadowing and, in brilliant, Mad Hatter conundrums, entering the fragmented shards of today’s nightmarish oxymorons long before the artists currently trying to give them the joker’s ephemeral maps of discourse. The author thinks of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” that cryptic refusal to reduce the warped mirrors of reality to prosaic lies, or, perhaps “All Along the Watchtower” or “Mr Tambourine Man.” Even more than Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which curiously enough comes off as overly esoteric, too studied, too conscious, Dadd’s entire existence foreshadows the forbidden entrance into the numinous, the realization of the inexplicable labyrinths of contemporary existence, that wonderfully rich Marcel Duchamp landscape of puns and satiric paradigms, that surrealistic parallax of the brilliant gamester Salvador Dali, that smirking irony of the works of Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Robert Indiana; that fragmented, meta-fictional struggle of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. John Lennon certainly sensed it and couldn’t help but push into meta-real worlds in his own lyrics. Think of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus,” and the more self-conscious “Revolution Number 9.” In “Yer Blues,” he even refers to Dylan’s main character, Mr Jones from “Ballad of a Thin Man.” If Lennon’s song is taken seriously, literally, then it is a dark crying out by a suicidal man, “Lord, I’m lonely, wanna die”; or, if taken as a metaphor for a lover’s lost feelings about his unfulfilled love, it falls into the romantic rant of a typical blues or teenage rock-and-roll song. However, even on this level, it has an irony about it, a sense of laughing at itself and at Dylan’s Mr Jones, who knows something is going on but just not what it is, and then, by extension, all of us who have awakened to the fact that the studied Western world doesn’t make sense, all of us who struggle to find meaning in the nonsense images, characters, and happenings in the song, and perhaps, coming to a conclusion that the nonsense is the sense.

As atrocity has become characteristic of modern history, testimonial writing has become a major twentieth-century genre. Untimely Interventions relates testimonial writing, or witnessing, to the cultural situation of aftermath, exploring ways in which a culture can be haunted by its own history. Ross Chambers argues that culture produces itself as civilized by denying the forms of collective violence and other traumatic experience that it cannot control. In the context of such denial, personal accounts of collective disaster can function as a form of counter-denial. By investigating a range of writing on AIDS, the First World War, and the Holocaust, Chambers shows how such writing produces a rhetorical effect of haunting, as it seeks to describe the reality of those experiences culture renders unspeakable. Ross Chambers is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Michigan. His other books includeFacing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author.

The 13th edition of the International Who's Who in Poetry is a unique and comprehensive guide to the leading lights and freshest talent in poetry today. Containing biographies of more than 4,000 contemporary poets world-wide, this essential reference work provides truly international coverage. In addition to the well known poets, talented up-and-coming writers are also profiled. Contents: * Each entry provides full career history and publication details * An international appendices section lists prizes and past prize-winners, organizations, magazines and publishers * A summary of poetic forms and rhyme schemes * The career profile section is supplemented by lists of Poets Laureate, Oxford University professors of poetry, poet winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, winners of the Pulitzer Prize for American Poetry and of the King's/Queen's Gold medal and other poetry prizes.